Death Of The CrunchPad

OK, this was one tablet that I actually was looking forward to.

Michael Arrington has posted that the Crunchpad is dead.

The plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20. 1,000 of the devices would be available pre-sale and they would start taking orders immediately. Larger scale production would begin early in 2010.

Arrington then goes on to tell a bizarre tale of getting an email from Chandra Rathakrishnan, their partner on the project, telling them that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.

“We still acknowledge that Arrington and TechCrunch bring some value to your business endeavor…If he agrees to our terms, we would have Arrington assume the role of visionary/evangelist/marketing head and Fusion Garage would acquire the rights to use the Crunchpad brand and name. Personally, I don’t think the name is all that important but you seem to be somewhat attached to the name.”

Arrington compares it to Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifiying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.

But was it ever real?

I guess we may never know.